They Said It

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link
discovery, truths will either be out or be outed, later if not sooner.

—William Gibson

When it gets to the point where people are
canceling publishing of books, it's very
scary. It's a sort of censorship.

—Bill Pollock, No Starch Press, on the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, New York Times, July 10, 2003

The great anti-Linux mantra is gone. It has
disappeared. Not one of the more than 60 responses
mentioned a need for easier installation of the
operating system. Kudos to everyone who helped to
make that happen.

—Joe Barr, NewsForge

Development Management System in a Box: GForge

GForge (gforge.org), the Web-based collaborative
software development system, has released a 3.0 version. GForge
combines features such as a bug tracking system, CVS version
control, Web interface to CVS, and archived Mailman mailing lists.
New features for 3.0 include a project management system with Gantt
charts, along with internationalization and simpler installation.
GForge is the actively maintained free software fork of the software that powers
SourceForge.net. Requires: PostgreSQL, Apache, OpenSSL and PHP.

PhotoGen:

PhotoGen is another great, easy-to-use script to
create a Web album of photos effortlessly. Scripts like this
make it easy for anyone to create an index page
of thumbnails and directly transfer the entire directory
to a Web server. With a quick link to the
directory, anyone can view your photos.
Requires: bash and ImageMagick.

vshnu:

A variation on a shell, this particular “shell”
provides a graphical environment
for a virtual terminal, while still allowing
access to the underlying system.
Properly setup, vshnu could serve as a batch
menu file for new users. Written in Perl, all of Perl's
power is available from vshnu. If you want
a change from your standard CLI, this is worth
a look, though it takes a little getting used to.
Requires: Perl, Perl modules: Term::Screen, Term::ANSIColor,
Term::ReadLine::Perl and a termcap file.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

A new system call, tgkill(), has been
introduced to handle certain obscure error
conditions in which a signal sent to one process
may end up going to a completely different
process. Ingo Molnar implemented the call,
and Linus Torvalds suggested the name tgkill
to correspond to the call's inputs: thread and
group. The old call, pthread_kill(), allowed
the bug involving signal misplacement and only
operated on thread IDs as input.

Eugene Weiss has created Submount, a new attempt to
support hard disk hot plugging. It includes a module
called subfs, which creates a dummy filesystem at
the desired mountpoint. This module then performs
mounting and unmounting operations before and
after all filesystem operations. This way, the
hardware can be removed at any time, without risk
of data corruption.

The OpenPOSIX test suite has reached 1.0.0. This milestone contains tests
for core POSIX conformance in the areas of signals, message queues,
semaphores, timers and process scheduling. Although this is not a
Linux-specific tool and Linux itself is not as concerned with POSIX
conformance as other OSes, the OpenPOSIX test suite still is quite useful
for areas where Linux does value conformance.

Martin Schlemmer found that OSS
sound worked on his ICH5 (Intel I/O Controller
Hub), simply by adding the ICH5 IDs to the list in
the kernel sources. This could be useful for some
systems, but as Jeff Garzik has pointed out,
it does not work for all ICH5s out there.

QLogic has rewritten its
Fibre Channel (FC)
driver completely for its ISP21xx/ISP22xx/ISP23xx chips and HBAs. The driver
removes all support for the 2.4 kernel but adds significant
performance enhancements. Their goal is to get the driver into the
official 2.5 tree before the 2.6 time frame.

In preparation for Serial ATA (SATA),
Jeff Garzik has
created a driver to access ATA disks across the SCSI interface. He says
the particular features of SCSI, as well as its advanced support for
modern kernel features like SysFS, make it a very good host for SATA
support. By going through the SCSI layer, he was able to rely on many
such features that he otherwise would have had to code by hand.

Ingo Molnar has announced the Exec Shield
security feature, which provides protection against
many (though not all) potential exploits. Stack,
buffer and function pointer overflows all are
guarded against, along with many other
attacks. This is done without requiring any
recompilation of user applications. Although
not a complete solution, Exec Shield promises
to be quite effective in conjunction with other
security measures.

Remote Filesystem Checker:

The remote filesystem checker (RFC) allows you to run filesystem
checks on a number of remote systems from one master node. RFC uses
SSH to log in and check each system. This can be run nightly from
cron and a report is sent to the administrator, which lets you see a
number of systems on one report rather than getting one from each
individual system. Requires: OpenSSH, BASH, cron, Perl and AIDE
(optional).

Jahshaka: Open-Source Real-Time Editing and Effects

Let's say you want to do real-time editing and effects—the kind of
stuff you get with high-end Avid systems or applications
like Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro. You're going to spend
thousands, and if you're really serious, the costs can run into six figures,
easy.

Well, not anymore, thanks to Jahshaka, “The World's First Open-Source
Real-Time Editing and Effects System”. The brainchild of Jah Shaka, a
native of Kingston, Jamaica, and a music industry veteran, the project
has (at the time of this writing) reached the alpha stage and runs on Linux, IRIX,
Windows and (soon) OS X. Right now the modules include Effects,
Animation, Editing, Paint, Text, Player and Compositor.
Jahshaka is developed in the OpenML programming environment, which
supports capturing, transporting, processing, displaying and
synchronizing digital media. It's GPL'd too. See www.jahshaka.com and www.khronos.org/openml.

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